Bloomsbury’s twin powerhouses

Rosemary Ashton has always been fascinated by the ways in which ideas ‘materialise’. Her first book, The German Idea, tracked the subtle filaments of Germanism in 19th-century British culture. In this, her latest book, she anatomises an area of London where more formative ideas have been conceived, and brought to fruition, than in any other of the metropolitan villages.

Covent Garden is theatrical (and, bits of it, louche), Soho is bohemian (even more louche), Kensington is a home to science. In Bloomsbury it is the ‘march of mind’ that gives WC1 its distinctive character.

Ashton sees Bloomsbury as a constellation of ‘progressive institutions’ — intellectual structures which have been as formative for Britain as the Revolution was for France. Two intimately linked powerhouses dominate. One is the University of London (since 1836 ‘UCL’), ‘the Godless Place in Gower Street’. The other, 200 yards to the south (Birkbeck College, Rada, Soas, the Institute of Historical Studies and the School of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene intervening) is the British Museum — what the novelist Thackeray, looking up at Panizzi’s great dome, called the ‘brain pan of London’.